At RatingWidget we focus on ratings. That’s where we excel and focus at. We do not support commenting. If you like to add comments to your site, there are plenty of great solutions for that. For example: DISQUS, Facebook Comments, Livefyre.

Bottom line – we help to bring new potential customers to the store while Yotpo helps to close the deal by showing previous clients reviews (if positive). How we do that? We help the store to use the wisdom of the crowd, and collect an instant feedback using straight forward 5 star rating. Then, by leveraging the Rich-Snippets Premium feature, the ratings intelligently embedded into Google’s SERP to increase the CTR by up to 30%. More traffic = more sales!

Aggregated ratings are only supported for users’ ratings. There could be a great forum Topic/Question with terrible Replies/Answers. Thus, we want to provide the option to separately rate forum topics and forum replies.

The first thing you should do is to make sure that you’ve configured the ratings’ rich-snippets correctly. Go back to the this topic and follow the instructions. Once the configuration is right, usually it takes about two weeks until Google will add the Rich-Snippets ratings. It’s really varies according your store’s content quality, crawling frequency, pagerank and many other parameters. Even though we have many clients that the ratings appeared on their SERP, we can’t assure that Google will eventually add the ratings’ rich-snippets. Unfortunately we don’t have an access to their algorithms.

In order to prevent from multiple votes from the same visitor (check out the topic about voting frequency here), our default identification technique is cookies. We leverage both regular HTTP cookie and LSO (Local shared object a.k.a Flash Cookie) to uniquely mark the visitor’s device. As you probably figured out, it’s very simple to clean your cookies or use incognito mode, to actually make more than one vote from the same device. Thus, if fraud votes is a critical issue for you, our premium product support additional identification methods:

By IP: These visitor identification method means that by default only one vote can be contributed from the IP. The advantage of this method is that it’s much harder to change IPs than cookies (requires some hacking skills but possible using proxies, etc.). The disadvantage is that different visitors who are using the same NAT (E.g. same router device), won’t be able to vote more than once.

By Login: We provide a very useful JavaScript callback called beforeRate, you can use it to force a login to your site before being able to rate. Note: These method is also not 100% safe and could be hacked.

By Social Login: Before a visitor can rate, he is required to connect his social identify with RatingWidget (currently we’ve implemented Facebook Connect). We believe this is the most safe identification method for many reasons. The main one is that in order to make fraud/fake vote – it requires a new social identity (creating of social identity takes time, requires unique email, etc.). The disadvantage of this method is that it significantly reduces the number of votes (some people don’t like to connect their social identity with external services).

Yes it is! The RatingWidget WordPress extension plays well with WordPress multisite networks. Just note, that if your network is using multiple domains and you would like to upgrade to one of the paid plans, you’ll have to use a separate license for every domain.